#knb122

Here is the final version of my rotoscope sequence (basketball dunking scene).

Firstly, I filled up the rest of the frames for the second construction and gesture drawing parts. After that, I went back to the first gesture drawing to smooth out the movement of the player that I mentioned before in the previous draft. It turned out pretty well, I supposed.

Overall, I’m quite fond with this piece of work that I had comparing to the Head Turn and Weight Lift animation that I’d done. This one felt the most natural out of all of them. The amount of frames was also a great difference between each of those animation as wells. Head Turn only had 96 frames, Weight Lift only had 164 but this one had 264 frames. The craziest thing was the fact that I hand drew every single frame for all of those animation. For Head Turn and Weight Lift, I copied a little bit such as the object, or the simple rotating of the head and body. However, for this one, I drew every single frame, one by one, without copying at all. It took quite a long time but I think it was definitely worth it.

In conclusion, I had learned so much more in this semester. Last semester, I was only introduced to the design and storyboarding parts in animating. This semester, when I actually had to get my hand on the animation, it was a lot more tougher than I expected. The amount of drawings that I had to do was insane, and it was only a few seconds video at max. I can’t imagine the amount of effort that professional animators have to do for hourly movies. Regardless, it gave me all the motivation to push myself forward in order to reach that level.

After I got the image sequence from my referenced sport video, I started sketching out all the frames available, which was only about 58-59. The first frame was given to me by the fellow student above me, with a Tennis video as a reference.

As you can see, I divided up the frames rather weirdly at first, but it was actually quite simple. Here was the way how I worked out my frames:

1 second morphing transition - frame 1 - 24 (given frame)

2 seconds gesture drawings - frame 25 - 72

2 seconds construction drawings - frame 73 - 120

2 seconds fully rendered drawings - frame 121 - 168

2 seconds construction drawings - frame 169 - 216

2 seconds gesture drawings - frame 217 - 264

The second version of the animation can show how the style changed more clearly.

After I split up the frames equally from the image sequence to 264 frames, all I needed to do was filling in the gap.

The next one is going to be the full morphing transition of my rotoscope animation.

The fourth version had the first gesture drawing part fully done.

The fifth version had the construction and fully rendered drawing parts done. However, I also realised there was a strange movement back in the gesture drawing, right after the morphing. It was as if the basketball player froze for a bit, and then quickly moved up the ball, which wasn’t really what happened in the referenced video so I needed to fix on that.

This will be the actual reference of my sport video for the Rotoscoping Sequence. This is a slow motion dunking scene that I got from Youtube which was very similar to the one I wanted to do previously.

Here is the second version of my Weight Lift animation, with more frames in between to show clearer intention and image.

The animation was not too bad, but needed a bit more work in the end, such as getting exhausted after the lift or something.

Here is the next draft, with more frames to smooth out the movement and also an extra action in the end of the character sitting down after a heavy lifting session. It makes the animation a bit more realistic in my opinion, especially with the heavy breathing.

Moving on to the next version, I simply added more frames to make the animation more realistic, but there was still a bit of stiffness on the character and the block when it falls down.

Finally, this is the last updated of my Weight Lift. I made the movement a lot more smoother but then at the same time, there was several problems with it. 

First, the beginning of the animation wasn’t that great when I tried to make the character bending down to observe the object. It felt like a simple rotating action instead of actually bending down with curiosity. It felt very unrealistic and unnatural there. Also, near the end of the animation when the character sat down, it was somehow too fast. I wanted to make it like a quick drop as how someone would seem when they fell down from exhaustion. However, it was fast at the beginning just to be slow near the end which didn’t make much sense. I tried adding more frames at the beginning of it, and lessen near the end but it still felt a bit unnatural.